A More Connected America:

Excerpts from Julius Genachowski’s Address to the Staff of the Federal Communications Commission on His First Day as FCC Chairman, June 30, 2009

With each passing day, communications devices and networks become more essential to the fabric of the daily lives of all Americans. They are how we receive news, information, and entertainment; how we stay in touch with our friends and family—simply to talk, or in times of emergency; how we work at and run our businesses, large and small; how we—and people across the globe—learn about government, and express points of view.

 Put simply, our communications infrastructure is the foundation upon which our economy and our society rest. And it has never been more important that we unleash its potential.

Our nation is at a crossroads. We face a number of tremendous challenges: our economy, education, health care, and energy, to name a few. If we do our jobs right and harness the power of communications to confront these challenges, we will have chosen the right course, and we will make a real positive difference in the lives of our children and future generations. Just imagine: 

A small business in Gettysburg will be able to connect and compete with businesses in Pittsburgh, or even Johannesburg.

An elderly person in Georgia will be able get remote medical monitoring from a specialist at Georgetown, better health care at lower cost.

A struggling eighth grader in Columbia, S.C., will be able to get tutoring from a student at Columbia University.

And parents in Baltimore will be able to connect with live video to their son or daughter serving in Baghdad or Afghanistan.

As the country’s expert agency on communications, it is our job to pursue this vision of a more connected America, focusing on the following goals:

•    Promoting universal broadband that’s robust, affordable and open.

•    Pursuing policies that promote job creation, competition, innovation and investment.

•    Protecting and empowering consumers and families.

•    Helping deliver public safety communications networks with the best technology to serve our firefighters, police officers, and other first responders.

•    Advancing a vibrant media landscape, in these challenging times, that serves the public interest in the 21st century.

•    Seizing the opportunity for the United States to lead the world in mobile communications.

These are just some of the goals we will pursue in the days ahead.

How we will work will be central to what we can achieve.

We will be fair.

We will be open and transparent.

Our policy decisions will be fact-based and data-driven.

We will strive to be smart about technology; smart about economics and businesses; smart about law and history; and smart every day about how our actions affect the lives of consumers.

We will use technology and new media to enhance the everyday worklives of FCC staff, green the agency, and improve overall operations of the FCC – running efficiently, communicating effectively, and opening the agency to participation from everyone affected by the FCC’s actions.  And, stay tuned, we will have a new FCC website. 

None of this will happen overnight.  I’ve been around this enough to know – and you’ve been around this enough to know – that you can’t just snap your fingers and make it happen. It will take hard, often unglamorous, work by all of us.  But with all of the talent in this agency, I know that, when we pull in the same direction and when we focus on our mission and what the American people expect of us, we can achieve great things. In the end, I want people to look at the FCC – our FCC -- and say “this is an agency that works.”

So far, I’ve talked about what we are going to do, and how we are going to do it.  I’d like to close by talking about why.  Why do we serve in government and why do we serve at the FCC?

We serve because we believe our nation can always do better and that it must do better. We serve because, in our America, we are defined not by what we earn, but by what we give.

We all have our own stories, our own personal reasons for choosing public service.  For me, it starts with my parents, immigrants, from whom I learned the meaning of the American Dream. And from whom I learned another powerful lesson.

Some of you may have heard me tell the story about the time I was in high school and my dad took me into the dusty stacks of the MIT library, and showed me engineering plans he had drafted as a graduate student.  They were for a device designed to someday help blind people “read” words on paper by translating text into physical signals.

The formulas and drawings didn’t make much sense to me, but the core lesson has remained with me: communications technology has the power to transform lives for the better.

That’s never been more true than today.  Communications must play a role in solving many of our nation’s most pressing challenges.  It’s the FCC’s job – our job – to turn this aspiration into reality.  We will be judged by whether we find concrete, practical ways to improve the lives of all of our nation’s people.  

Why do we serve at the FCC?

We do it for this moment. We do it for this opportunity. Will we capture it?  Looking at the faces in this audience, I already know the answer.

Let’s get to work.